by Mezz Mezzrow
Pee Wee and Bix shared a small room off the kitchen that would have made any self-respecting porker turn up his snout and walk away. They slept in their clothes most all the time, stretched out with King Kong. The first thing they did when they unglued their lamps each day was to reach for the gallon of corn that always leaned against the bedpost and wash out their mouths. Those cats used corn mash like it was Lavoris. Whenever you tipped into their room you had to pile through big stacks of empty sardine and baked-bean cans; those two canned delicacies made up the whole menu in this establishment. The back porch was loaded with thirty or forty quarts of milk, some of them over a month old. Every day the milkman left two quarts and sometimes the boys would remember to drink a bottle but most of the time they forgot. They kept saying they were going to leave the milkman a note telling him to nix out the moo-juice, but they never did find a pencil and paper at the same time so the deliveries went on for two whole summers.
The back yard held the overflow from the junkpile. Out there was a pump and a washtub where the boys made their toilet, such as it was—if you batted your eye once you missed it entirely. When they shaved they just set up a mirror on the fender of an old Buick, or something that was rumored to have been a Buick once, that stood out there developing more sags and slumps each day. That rattletrap was rigor mortis on wheels, and there was a story behind it. One day, it seems, Bix and Pee Wee decided they needed some rubber, so they bought up this struggle-buggy for thirty-five bucks. It wasn’t running then—so far as any of us knew, it never did run—but those two Barney Oldfields weren’t stumped. They pushed it all the way out to their cottage and there it squatted forever after; nobody even tried to budge it again. It made a good sturdy shaving rack, though, and the boys were happy with it. They figured to live right in the country you had to have a car.
That morning, as soon as we grabbed those cats out of their pads and played Heebie Jeebies for them, they all fractured their wigs. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bix kept chuckling as the record played over and over, and his long bony arms beat out the breaks, flailing through the air like the blades of a threshing machine. He never did get over Louis’ masterpiece. Soon as it was over he grabbed it from the machine and tore out of the house, to wake up everybody he knew around Hudson Lake and make them listen to it. It was this same record that inspired Bix and Frankie Trombauer, a little later that same year (1926), to make two discs of their own that are now collectors’ items—Royal Garden Blues and Singin’ the Blues.
The occasion called for a party, but when Bix went prowling for his jug of corn he found it was drained dry. He looked accusingly at Pee Wee and his face got all wrinkled with disgust. “Uh, uh,” he said, “the Ghost was at it again. We better go down to The Old Maids’ and get us some more juice to celebrate with—hell, I’m so dry I couldn’t even spit cotton.”
Off we flew in my brougham to a rickety old farmhouse about ten miles down the road, a place haunted by two barefooted raggedy old hags who must have been witches retired on a pension. When you drove up in front of their lopsided henhouse you had to stay put in your car—about a dozen lean and mangy man-eating hounds roamed around the yard, baring their fangs and trying to leap over the picket fence to sample the meat on your buttocks. Sitting in the car, we blew the horn and yelled, “Hey there! Anybody home? You got some cash customers!” until those two shriveled-up ghosts in gingham dresses came tottering out. When we gave them our order one of these apparitions took a shovel and hobbled out to the fields to dig up some of the gallon jugs of corn they had buried there. We laid in a real supply of that poison, at two bucks per crock, and cut out fast. On the way back we ran out of gas, so all the guys had to get out and push the car home. Bix cussed up a breeze and threatened to pour some of that corn in the gas tank. “If it does the same thing in that motor that it does in my stomach,” he panted, “this old buggy ought to take off and coast home on the treetops.”
They told me this place was called Hudson Lake because there’s a body of water somewhere around there. I must have gone out there twenty times to see Bix, but I still have to see anything that looked like a lake—there was always so much excitement in the air, and so much drinking and jamming and fooling around, that the time flew by like in a dream and we hardly knew the world existed outside of that greasy shack. Maybe we just weren’t the outdoor type. Anyhow, on this particular night, like all the other times we visited him, Bix sat at that beat-up piano for hours, sometimes making our kind of music and sometimes drifting off into queer harmony patterns that the rest of us couldn’t dig. The rest of the world melted away; we were the last men left on earth, skidding on a giant billiard-ball across a green felt vacuum with no side-pockets, while Bix crouched over his keyboard in a trance, barleycorned and brooding, tickling bizarre music out of the ivories.
Bix was already reaching out beyond the frontiers of jazz, into some strange musical jungle where he hoped to find Christ-knows-what; he had the explorer’s itch but he couldn’t tell you what new flora and fauna he was trailing. We didn’t want to tag along, but he kept urging us to follow. During those long drunken nights, when everything real looked like a pipe-dream and the wildest fantasies seemed so substantial and alive you could almost reach out and touch them, he kept straining at the leash, trying to break away from jazz into some entirely new musical language. Over and over he would play the peculiar “modern” music that was like a signpost to him, showing him where he thought he had to go—Stravinsky’s Firebird, Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, Eastwood Lane’s Adirondack Sketches (the one called “Dirge to Indian Joe” was a favorite of Bix’s), some of the compositions of McDowell, and Gustav Holst’s symphony The Planets, the one where human voices represent the different heavenly bodies. These musical tangents, leading to a dozen different detours, were all scrambled up with the jazz in Bix’s head, and that mess finally led him to compose In a Mist. “Hey, get a load of this,” he called out to us that night, and then he played his new composition through.
It made us all a little uncomfortable, because so much of it was out of our idiom. Some parts were pretty, maybe, but it didn’t send me like Earl Hines always did. We humored Bix along for a while, to let him get that hightony stuff out of his system, and then we all yelled “Royal Garden! How about Royal Garden?” When he switched to the blues, hunching over the keyboard and jerking his shoulders rhythmically as he beat out the good solid chords we knew, we relaxed and had a good time. Then he was back in the groove, the one we all belonged in.
Get this straight, we pure-and-simple jazzmen didn’t scoff the “serious” composers exactly, but they weren’t in our school, they didn’t express our feelings and ideas and we didn’t want to change like Bix was beginning to. One thing about symphony music that really tickled us, made us bust our conks laughing, was the way the pompous director posed up front with his stick, as ungraceful and mechanical as an epileptic metronome, especially when he’d break out during a heavy overture and put on a frantic scene, his long hair fluttering up a breeze and his arms pumping like he was a pitcher winding up to shoot a spitball over the plate. Never mind about the composer’s ideas when he wrote the music down. We were all music-makers too, instrumentalists as well as creators—to us the two things were one, a guy composed as he played, the creating and the performing took place at the same time—and we kept thinking what a drag it must be for any musician with spirit to have to sit in on a symphonic assembly-line. Could a musician really stand up and tell his story, let his guts come romping out, when he had to keep one eye glued on a dancing puppet and the other on his music? That’s like handcuffing an anarchist to a billy-swinging cop on one side and a gospel-spieling preacher on the other and then telling him to be happy because he’s a free man. A creative musician is an anarchist with a horn, and you can’t put any shackles on him. Written music is like handcuffs; and so is the pendulum in white-tie-and-tails up on the conductor’s stand. Symphony means slavery in any jazzman’s dictionary.
Jazz and freedom are synonyms.
Once, back in Chicago, a bunch of us went over to the Wurlitzer store and there in the window we saw our whole philosophy on display. They had a kind of animated-doll symphony orchestra set up there, run by some hidden electrical clockwork—the leader was planted up on the rostrum jerking his arms like they were twin windshield wipers, the violinists pumped back and forth like they were sawing wood, and all the other musicians bobbed and twitched the same way, with the clipped military precision of a goose-stepping army. One-two, one-two—take their clock away and they’d go around in circles, like travelers without a compass. Well, a creative musician doesn’t need compasses or guides or maps or signposts; goddamn that stuff, the spirit’s in him and it’ll show him the way. One-hundred-men-with-a-fuehrer, a musical battalion hypnotized by a dictator’s baton—that’s no kind of a set-up for a man’s inspired soul to shake loose and jump out of his instrument in a flood of carefree, truth-speaking, right-from-the-heart music.
“Wonderful!” Dave Tough said when he caught sight of that window exhibit. “There it is—that’s the answer.” We all laughed like hell. But when we tried to tell Bix about it later our story only got a feeble grin out of him. There had always been a touch of the militaristic, the highly disciplined and always-under-control, in his horn technique, and it was showing up stronger in his attitude towards music all the time, till he finally couldn’t see what was so funny in that puppet-orchestra with its mechanical-doll conductor. He was a virtuoso technically, that’s the truth, but jazz didn’t mean for him what it meant for real hotmen, especially Negro ones—a geyser of boiling emotions, opening all your windows and letting your feelings flood out in a rush and a roar, instinct and spirit taking over. Jazz wasn’t riot-in-music to him; his head always gave orders to his heart. The jazz wasn’t the end for him, it was just a springboard to something else, some new kind of expression that would let him say different things. Till the day he died he never did find that “something else.” And he looked plenty hard too, until the effort finally killed him, or anyhow made him drink himself to death. (He died in 1931.)
That same frantic day at Hudson Lake, Bix nearly got run over by a locomotive. Long after the sun came up we ran out of corn, and Bix, with a tricky look in his eyes, called me and Pee Wee aside, along with a couple of the other guys. “I just remembered,” he whispered, “that I got a spare gallon buried up on the hill, and if we sneak over there without these other lushes, there’ll be enough to go around.” We crept out Indian-file, with Bix leading the way like an old frontier scout.
Down the path we followed him, across some fields, then over a railroad track and a high fence topped with barbed wire. Sure enough, he dug out a jug, handed it to Pee Wee, and started back. But as we were hopping the fence Pee Wee, frail as a nail and big as a minute, got stuck on the wire and just hung there, squealing for help and hugging the jug for dear life. If he let go of that crock he could have pulled himself loose, but not Pee Wee—what’s a guy’s hide compared to a gallon of corn? By this time Bix, having staggered down to the railroad tracks, found he had a lot of sand between his toes, so he sat down on the rail and yanked his shoes off to empty them. Just then we saw a fast train coming round the bend. All of us began screaming at Bix to get the hell out of there, but he thought we were just kidding him and he threw some stones at us. That train wasn’t more than a hundred feet away when he finally woke up to what was happening. Then he just rolled off the track and tumbled down the bank head first, traveling so fast he didn’t have time to snatch his shoes off the rail. Those funky oxfords got clipped in half as neatly as if they’d been chopped with a meat-cleaver. “That just goes to show you,” Bix told us, “it’s dangerous for a man to take his shoes off. First time I took those things off in weeks and you see what the hell happens. It just ain’t safe to undress.”
We had some wonderful, out-of-the-world times with Bix at Hudson Lake, whole days and nights when the clock stopped and we blew our tops playing music and clowning. They were some of the best times I ever had; I’ll never forget them. But Bix was growing away from us—finally he drifted clean out of our sphere, never to come home again. Losing his head over “serious” modern music made him go way tangent, until it changed his whole life and personality. He wasn’t so regular with us any more after he joined up with Whiteman’s band in 1928—why, when he came on to New York he started wearing wing collars, got himself cleaned up, sprouted a moustache and an English accent, and even began washing his socks. We never did dig this change in him; a lot of the music he tried to sell us seemed like something second-grade, and some of it was really corny.
When you come right down to it, what brought about the whole change in American music? What spread the gospel of jazz far and wide across the country, pulling at least one part of our native music free at last from European influences? It was the rebel in us. Our rebel instincts broke music away from what I’d call the handcuff-and-straitjacket discipline of the classical school, so creative artists could get up on the stand and speak out in their own honest and self-inspired language again. There had been a rebel in Bix too—but a pint-sized one, a little stunted and gimpy, afraid to bust out and romp all over the place. It got even frailer and more anemic when the schooled musicians got after him.
American jazz lost one of its greatest disciples when Bix strayed away. He should have kept his dirty socks on, and never started sleeping between sheets.
●
Good news: test records of two numbers, Royal Garden Blues and Singin’ the Blues, expected by Bix and Frankie Trombauer from New York any day. Why didn’t I shoot over and dig them? R.S.V.P., and bring your own gunja.
Good deal; Dave Tough and I hopped into my chariot and shoved off for Bix’s happy hunting grounds without even changing our shirts. I swear, we were making the run between Chicago and Detroit like a couple of Pullman porters. But this trip didn’t pan out like the others.
It all started after we heard the tests. Dave sat in with the Greystone band, and Danny Polo, the clarinetist, almost blew his fuse when he heard him. No sooner did Danny get off the bandstand than he began to high-pressure us with a Chamber-of-Commerce spiel about Europe, where he’d once toured with some college-kid band. “Now there’s a place where a musician really begins to live,” he told us, that silver tongue of his shifting into high gear. Right then he could have sold us the Brooklyn Bridge without a money-back guarantee, his jive ran so smooth. “Why, it’s a musician’s paradise—the hotter you get, the more they’ll rave about you, nobody ever turns out the lights and yells for the cops. Then you take the dames, say, those continental women don’t put on any fancy airs, they know what the score is and they let you know it. And besides, nobody cares about the color of a man’s skin over there, so their blood-pressure doesn’t shoot up if somebody tells them that jazz is colored man’s music. Jim Crow never went barnstorming across the Atlantic.”
Europe? That wasn’t Europe, it was a cloudland made-to-order for jazzmen that flashed through Danny’s hot skull in a muta-dream. Dave and I sure thought his imagination was in the saddle and riding high that night, galloping straight for the millennium. . . . It was just a gumbeating session at first; we were just jawblocking to pass the time. But that Danny laid down a super hype, and blow my nose and call me Snorty if we didn’t wind up with him giving notice to the Goldkette office so all three of us could pack our toothbrushes and catch the next boat for that joy-country. Back to Chicago we drove that very night to prepare for our grand tour of the Continent, Danny coaching us in the Frog lingo all the way home so we could gab with the parlay-voo’s when we landed in good old Paree.
Uh-uh: we hit a petticoated snag. The minute Dave’s wife Dorothy heard about Paris she set her heart on going too. Now we had fixed it to work our way over, and the quota for the ship’s band was three, so I was left out in the cold. “Don’t worry, Milton,” they told me. “Soon as we hit that town and get set we’ll send for you, no stuff.” I was really i
n the dumps, but fate had me by the thin hairs and wouldn’t turn me loose.
The night before they left for New York to catch their ship, Dave let me know he was having trouble with his room rent and needed my help to sneak his luggage out from under the hotel manager’s bloodhound snout. Feeling lower than a toadstool, I drove my car down the alley in back of his place and he lowered his grips into the rumble seat with the aid of a clothesline; then I dropped him and Dorothy at the station and off to Europe they went. By the time I finally got to Paris myself, he was on the high seas heading for the States.
Our old gang was busting up fast, and it wasn’t wedding bells that did it because wedding bells had a way of getting jammed up whenever we were around. No, what got into everybody was plain ordinary wanderlust and a yearning for greener pastures. The Chicagoans, including some of the Austin High Gang, were pulling a creep in a dozen different directions, each one trailing his own personal rainbow, and nothing could stop their migration. What with Dave on the other side of the drink and Tesch playing at the Midway Gardens with Muggsie Spanier and Jess Stacy, Bud Freeman and I were two lonesome oscars. About the only consolation we had was that young hopeful, Frank “Josh” Billings.